The effects of peer influence on adolescent pedestrian road-crossing decisions

Objective: Adolescence is a high-risk period for pedestrian injury. It is also a time of heightened susceptibility to peer influence. The aim of this research was to examine the effects of peer influence on the pedestrian road-crossing decisions of adolescents. Methods: Using 10 videos of road-crossing sites, 80 16- to 18-year-olds were asked to make pedestrian road-crossing decisions. Participants were assigned to one of 4 experimental conditions: negative peer (influencing unsafe decisions), positive peer (influencing cautious decisions), silent peer (who observed but did not comment), and no peer (the participant completed the task alone). Peers from the adolescent’s own friendship group were recruited to influence either an unsafe or a cautious decision. Results: Statistically significant differences were found between peer conditions. Participants least often identified safe road-crossing sites when accompanied by a negative peer and more frequently identified dangerous road-crossing sites when accompanied by a positive peer. Both cautious and unsafe comments from a peer influenced adolescent pedestrians’ decisions. Conclusions: These findings showed that road-crossing decisions of adolescents were influenced by both unsafe and cautious comments from their peers. The discussion highlighted the role that peers can play in both increasing and reducing adolescent risk-taking

Immigrants and the Community

First in a series based on the research project "Integrating the Needs of Immigrant Workers and Rural Communities," which attempts to inform New York communities about the nature and consequences of increasing immigrant settlement.Many upstate New York communities have experienced population loss and decline in the last decade. Increasing numbers of immigrants have settled in many of these communities, which poses possible community development challenges and opportunities. Because each community must address these issues in its own way, this report is intended to make communities aware of changes in their populations and highlight issues they may choose to address.USDA Fund for Rural America (grant #2001-36201-11283) and Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station (grant #33452

Immigrants and the Community: Farmworkers with Families

Second in a series based on the research project ?Integrating the Needs of Immigrant Workers and Rural Communities,? which attempts to inform New York communities about the nature and consequences of increasing immigrant settlement.America's hired farm workforce has changed considerably in the last decade. The most apparent change has been its "latinization" during the past two decades. This is largely a consequence of large numbers of Mexicans coming to the United States to work. Although Mexican immigrants work in numerous industries across the American landscape, they are especially important in agriculture. There has been a growing tendency of farmworkers to settle in rural communities together with their immediate family. But how and to what extent does community integration occur? How do foreigners who have little familiarity with American culture become integrated into the community? Answers to these questions have practical importance to farmers interested in retaining their workforce, service providers working to improve farmworker well-being and communities interested in helping the new residents contribute to community development. To help us understand the factors that both promote and limit the integration of immigrants into rural communities, we chose for study five New York agricultural communities in different economic and social contexts that have relied heavily on hired farm labor. Each community has a minority population of some significance and a history of immigrant farmworkers settling there

Evaluation of Muscat types and clones for the local market

Ten European clones and selections of 'Muscat blanc' were investigated about their variability in genetic and enological behavior. The SSR profile of about 120 loci allowed to differentiate most of them. Nevertheless the differences within the variety are rare and do not reflect the heterogeneity of  observed variability. One of the clones (B41/5) represents an earlier ripening type where the overall quality was independent from sugar content. A 27-1 clone was one of the clones with steady high rating concerning wine quality. An interesting alternative for early ripening areas could be the late ripening 'Goldmuskateller' due to the higher stability against Botrytis. One of the samples was not true to type and represented this cultivar

ESD Ideas: A 6-year oscillation in the whole Earth system?

An oscillation of about 6 years has been reported in Earth&rsquo;s fluid core motions, magnetic field, rotation, and crustal deformations. Recently, a 6-year cycle has also been detected in several climatic parameters (e.g., sea level, surface temperature, precipitation, land ice, land hydrology, and atmospheric angular momentum). Here we suggest that the 6-year oscillations detected in the Earth&rsquo;s deep interior, mantle rotation, and atmosphere are linked together, and that the core processes previously proposed as drivers of the 6-year cycle in the Earth&rsquo;s rotation, cause in addition the atmosphere to oscillate together with the mantle, inducing fluctuations in the climate system with similar periodicities.</p

Electron Spin Decoherence in Bulk and Quantum Well Zincblende Semiconductors

A theory for longitudinal (T1) and transverse (T2) electron spin coherence times in zincblende semiconductor quantum wells is developed based on a non-perturbative nanostructure model solved in a fourteen-band restricted basis set. Distinctly different dependences of coherence times on mobility, quantization energy, and temperature are found from previous calculations. Quantitative agreement between our calculations and measurements is found for GaAs/AlGaAs, InGaAs/InP, and GaSb/AlSb quantum wells.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

What difference does ("good") HRM make?

The importance of human resources management (HRM) to the success or failure of health system performance has, until recently, been generally overlooked. In recent years it has been increasingly recognised that getting HR policy and management "right" has to be at the core of any sustainable solution to health system performance. In comparison to the evidence base on health care reform-related issues of health system finance and appropriate purchaser/provider incentive structures, there is very limited information on the HRM dimension or its impact. Despite the limited, but growing, evidence base on the impact of HRM on organisational performance in other sectors, there have been relatively few attempts to assess the implications of this evidence for the health sector. This paper examines this broader evidence base on HRM in other sectors and examines some of the underlying issues related to "good" HRM in the health sector. The paper considers how human resource management (HRM) has been defined and evaluated in other sectors. Essentially there are two sub-themes: how have HRM interventions been defined? and how have the effects of these interventions been measured in order to identify which interventions are most effective? In other words, what is "good" HRM? The paper argues that it is not only the organisational context that differentiates the health sector from many other sectors, in terms of HRM. Many of the measures of organisational performance are also unique. "Performance" in the health sector can be fully assessed only by means of indicators that are sector-specific. These can focus on measures of clinical activity or workload (e.g. staff per occupied bed, or patient acuity measures), on measures of output (e.g. number of patients treated) or, less frequently, on measures of outcome (e.g. mortality rates or rate of post-surgery complications). The paper also stresses the need for a "fit" between the HRM approach and the organisational characteristics, context and priorities, and for recognition that so-called "bundles" of linked and coordinated HRM interventions will be more likely to achieve sustained improvements in organisational performance than single or uncoordinated interventions

Decoding the origins of vertical land motions observed today at coasts

In recent decades, geodetic techniques have allowed detecting vertical land motions and sea-level changes of a few millimetres per year, based on measurements taken at the coast (tide gauges), on board of satellite platforms (satellite altimetry) or both (Global Navigation Satellite System). Here, contemporary vertical land motions are analysed from January 1993 to July 2013 at 849 globally distributed coastal sites. The vertical displacement of the coastal platform due to surface mass changes is modelled using elastic and viscoelastic Green's functions. Special attention is paid to the effects of glacial isostatic adjustment induced by past and present-day ice melting. Various rheological and loading parameters are explored to provide a set of scenarios that could explain the coastal observations of vertical land motions globally. In well-instrumented regions, predicted vertical land motions explain more than 80 per cent of the variance observed at scales larger than a few hundred kilometres. Residual vertical land motions show a strong local variability, especially in the vicinity of plate boundaries due to the earthquake cycle. Significant residual signals are also observed at scales of a few hundred kilometres over nine well-instrumented regions forming observation windows on unmodelled geophysical processes. This study highlights the potential of our multitechnique database to detect geodynamical processes, driven by anthropogenic influence, surface mass changes (surface loading and glacial isostatic adjustment) and tectonic activity (including the earthquake cycle, sediment and volcanic loading, as well as regional tectonic constraints). Future improvements should be aimed at densifying the instrumental network and at investigating more thoroughly the uncertainties associated with glacial isostatic adjustment models.This research benefited from financial support from the CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, France) through the TOSCA committee fellowship and from the European Research Council within the framework of the SP2-Ideas Program ERC-2013-CoG, under ERC Grant agreement number 617588. GS is supported by a DiSPeA research grant (CUP H32I160000000005) and by Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide (PNRA 2013/B2.06, CUP D32I14000230005). AM was supported by an Australian Research Council Super Science Fellowship (FS110200045)

Anisotropic splitting of intersubband spin plasmons in quantum wells with bulk and structural inversion asymmetry

In semiconductor heterostructures, bulk and structural inversion asymmetry and spin-orbit coupling induce a k-dependent spin splitting of valence and conduction subbands, which can be viewed as being caused by momentum-dependent crystal magnetic fields. This paper studies the influence of these effective magnetic fields on the intersubband spin dynamics in an asymmetric n-type GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well. We calculate the dispersions of intersubband spin plasmons using linear response theory. The so-called D'yakonov-Perel' decoherence mechanism is inactive for collective intersubband excitations, i.e., crystal magnetic fields do not lead to decoherence of spin plasmons. Instead, we predict that the main signature of bulk and structural inversion asymmetry in intersubband spin dynamics is a three-fold, anisotropic splitting of the spin plasmon dispersion. The importance of many-body effects is pointed out, and conditions for experimental observation with inelastic light scattering are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Calibration of stakeholder influence in the UK higher education sector

Peer reviewedPublisher PD